How can I save a date, which can be partial (i.e. only a year, maybe a month), and display it later with the same specification?

Question

I want users to specify a date, which may or may not include day and month (but will have at least a year.) The problem is that it is stored as a date-time in the database; the missing day / month will be saved as the default values ​​and I will lose the original format and date value.

My idea was to save the actual format in the column as a row in addition to the datetime column. Then I could use a string column when I need to display the date and date-time for everything else. The drawback is that there is an additional column for each date column in the table that I want to display, and printing localized dates will not be so easy, since I cannot rely on the datetime value ... I will probably have to parse the row.

I hope I missed something, and it might be easier.

(Note. I use Rails if this is important for the solution.)

Answer 1

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Answer 4

, ISO 8601, :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Answer 5

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Answer 8

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Answer 9

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Answer 10

The built-in time types represent a point in time. You can use built-in types and create a column for precision (Year, Month, Day, Hour, etc.), Or you can create your own date structure and use empty parts (or another invalid value) for empty parts.

Answer 11

For a ruby, at least you can use this gem - partial date https://github.com/58bits/partial-date